Petersburg Quotes

“Hauntingly active as they share space with the living, the dead refuse to give up their undead residency.”
― Pamela K. Kinney, Paranormal Petersburg, Virginia, and the Tri-Cities Area

“In August 1914, the name of St Petersburg itself is changed to the more Slavonic Petrograd: in semiotic rebellion against this idiocy, the local Bolsheviks continue to style themselves the 'Petersburg Committee'.”
― China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

“Steve, the city's only legal aid attorney, also explained why Petersburg seemed so derelict.

"Desegregation," he said. "The day they integrated the schools was the day a lot of whites called U-Haul." Before the civil rights movement, Petersburg was so segregated that blacks and whites swore to tell the truth in court while placing their hands on separate Bibles. Following turbulent, court-ordered school integration in 1970, whites fled en masse to a suburb called Colonial Heights—or "Colonial Whites," as Steve called it. The suburb was now bigger than Petersburg and attracted almost all the area's new development.

Left behind was a struggling city of 38,000 people, three-quarters of them black and a quarter in poverty. Petersburg's apartheid was so profound that graduates of the first integrated class at the city's main public high school had recently held two twenty-fifth reunions: one for whites, one for blacks. Steve, who had moved to Petersburg straight after law school, planned to flee as soon as he could land a job elsewhere.

"This is the anus of the South," he said. Then, realizing he'd talked for twenty minutes straight, he asked, "What brings you guys to town?”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War